“Zombie Girl” – Behind The Scenes (Minecraft Animated Music Video)

Hey everyone i’m zach and this is micah and this is the behind the scenes of our new video zombie girl and we’re just gonna be watching the video and giving some behind the scenes commentary and talking about any interesting things that happened during production and stuff like that so let’s start right

So actually hold on puzzler so so something about all the cameras in this almost all the cameras uh so i wanted to have like a certain distinct camera style of this video so almost every camera is tilted in every single shot so it’ll be like this

And every shot is like moving in some way there’s i don’t think there’s any completely still cameras throughout this whole video it’s always moving so that there’s always this sort of like energy to it and the tilting is supposed to kind of give you the feeling that like something’s not right and everything’s

Kind of like you know off balance in a more literal sense and the camera work kind of like you know aids that point so yeah i mean that’s the reason that’s like that so before we go any further actually i think you should probably say how you even came up with

Doing this in the first place this is your idea well i i just i uh heard this song a few years ago and i’ve i’ve just been listening it like in the background just on my own time for i mean years and i never really thought about doing a

Music video about it until i mean only only a few months ago and i i just thought it was finally a good idea to you know try and do something different because like i mean we’ve been doing video game based songs i mean i guess minecraft is technically a video game

But stuff based on other properties like five nights at freddy’s or doki doki and stuff like that and i i just thought it’d be nice for you know a change of pace in like the music video area to have something that’s you know a bit more uh unique so

Yeah and the um what i heard from zachary is that the original zombie girl animation made by name i think is how you say it okay actually inspired some of the facial expressions that were used in some other videos actually that we made it well yeah it’s there i i think

There’s like a shot in just monica somewhere where one of the faces were inspired by the original mmd animation puka made of this zombie girl song macabre rotting girl and i mean just that that animation in general is like i i really like it and that’s what like a lot of the shots

From this video are like recreated versions of her so like uh her music video so like huge shout out to her for you know making the original for us to like get all this inspiration from yeah because a lot of it was from that animation originally yeah and a huge thanks to

Kathy from you know making the song and making me listen to it over and over so i would make the music video but yeah let’s continue png clouds oh yeah actually i want to talk about that um so all right stop okay so uh originally when we were

Entering the lighting stage for this animation um we were gonna have volumetric smoke throughout like almost every scene but it ended up taking like like 20 minutes of frame to render so we were just not gonna get it out on time if we were gonna do it that way

So what i did is i got some uh smoke videos on youtube and put them in after effects and just took away the background and i just made them on a flat plane and put them behind the characters in every scene so it’s just flat smoke in every shot and that

Reduced the render times from like 20 minutes a frame to like two minutes so i think for what it is though i mean it the smoke turned out good i don’t think many people noticed there there were some things i didn’t account for though that i noticed later and we didn’t have time

To re-render like the lights in front of the characters actually shone on to the smoke planes so sometimes when the lighting moves you can actually see like a flash of light on the smoke and it’s kind of i hadn’t thought about that so my bad so This is our first video to have like a character with like full dynamics fully dynamic dress and hair before i actually don’t think we had any before yeah any any other characters we had that had a dress or uh any any character that we had had before that had

You know moving hair or like a dress or something like in doki doki it was like all hand animated which was not uh the most efficient way to do it so bad it was so bad me and micah are not very great at dynamics so we didn’t

Really have any other way to do it but with this video we had a really talented team help us with all the um dynamics and a lot of stuff in this video was actually done by like the team but specifically dynamics we could not have done they totally

Saved us on that end yeah so we have no clue how to do it thank you all all those people who helped us do dynamics on this video yeah really appreciate it and actually this part right here with the uh the it’s showing on screen the smoke and the explosion that’s another thing

We haven’t done before uh pixel frosty actually simulated those smoke plumes and the giant explosion that comes out of the tank because we we haven’t done anything like that before too and then we think i think it turned out really well but that that was the one shot in this video that took

Really long to render it was like like 10 minutes of frame yeah so i think it was worth it though because it looks really really nice yeah it looks really really good it’s a good job pixel frosty The zombies in this we wanted to you know have them all be the exact same like steve skin because steve’s in the video well yeah that too i never really thought of it because of that actually but that’s a good point well yeah we had just we didn’t want

Every zombie to look copy pasted so like some have shirts some don’t some have like different colored shirts or pants it’s all like mixed up and stuff like that oh also something i want to say is like huge shout out to achebe because he did all the textures on all the

Characters i was just about to mention that you know and like some of the props too he like hand painted well not hand painted he painted it in blender by hand all the textures on all the characters and all the different variations of the zombies

So like huge shout out to him for doing that and it was i think it turned out really really well in this style so well on that point you should probably mention why you even chose to do it that way um i think it was a chubby’s idea actually because he

Had shown uh like it was just gonna i think the regular minecraft pixel skin but like i still planned on doing the hair like this and then i think it was a chebe who offered the like the option of doing it this hand-painted texture way because he had shown me in blender

That that was an option and so i said like just try try a version and like see how it turns out and it turned out like really well so i actually didn’t know that it was a chippy’s idea no it was a chip don’t you still have a picture of the

What she looked like before she had hd textures no no no i don’t do if if we do find it it’s right here it’s probably not there i just pointed the controller of the camera you just turn off the camera and i’m gonna pause the whole thing right now

Why am i stopping i’m just gonna pause it anyway okay here we go So with these three i think consecutive scenes here uh i had a hard time deciding where in the map she should be because she had been in the city and i thought it was like looking a little repetitive because we had just been in the city when it started

And i couldn’t figure out whether i wanted it to be in the city or not so i i was like seeing if i could maybe put her in a different map for this scene and it was like getting really complicated like these were like some of the last shots to get like

Finished and lay out and then micah told me like it’s fine so i i just put her in some weird places in the map like in the first shot she’s sitting on a tank and then on the second shot she’s sitting or she’s standing on the top of a sign

Don’t ask how she got up on that sign but it’s like way up where the buildings are so i i mean just well on on about the tank by the way uh i knew for that one shot where all the zombies are like there’s a top-down view showing

Like a ton of zombies all walking and it showed the tank explode uh i zachary knew that there was going to be a tank needed for that part so he just told me micah make a tank and i was like okay but it ended up taking so much longer

Than i anticipated i think i worked on that tank for like three or four days and then we were disappointed because i mean it turned out really high quality but then it was like we’re only gonna get to see it in one shot yeah so then he also included the tank where

She’s sitting on the barrel on that part and we ended up using it at the end where it shows the zombie apocalypse sponsorship thing yeah so we got a few uses out of it yeah but we got i have pictures of it that we can actually show right here

A few pictures of that tank so hopefully we can use it again and maybe some other animation too because it turned out like really nice yeah i took i spent so long texturing that tank i was just in there for days yeah but yeah This shot right here the brains brains brain shot was actually the first thing to get animated in this whole video like even before any of the layout because we had just finished like the uh the first concept of this character uh model so that was like the first

Thing i animated as a test animation and i i don’t it wasn’t even really supposed to end up in the final but everyone really liked the test so it was just really good that i i recommended him that we just keep it because i think it was

Really good yeah so we did keep it and that was like supposed to just be a test animation but it’s in the final music video Those are also png clouds those are actual clouds there just that part right there where she gets up when she’s first a zombie and then she kind of turns into a human like it turned out like so seamless like on accident because i i was trying to make it like you could

Really see it fading into into like the human version but like the way she like dipped into the shadows and came out like as a human was like so unintentional but it worked like perfectly the hair and dress dynamics are actually different on both of those shots

The the hair the hair is the same but the dress dynamics are different so i feel like i mean i think there’s some point where you can kind of see the dress change but you have to be looking like really close to be able to see that yeah we

Were kind of worried that it would look too different that it would not even look like it was fading properly yeah but it ended up looking even better than what we originally assumed This is my first time doing a lot of running actually because i haven’t done a lot of that before yes i think it turned out looking pretty good he actually you did something way deeper down though right no that was seth’s run cycle i just did an animation layer on top of

It where she’s like flailing her arms but on this i actually made the bass run cycle and i think it looks i think it turned out pretty good because i was really worried that i wouldn’t even be able to make something half decent looking but

I like how to go plus i actually found out about it’s a shame because this is our last blender project but i found out an important animation tool that i hadn’t known about ever since we started which is like in maya it’s called animation layers where you can

Have a base animation but then you can also set a fresh timeline where the animation’s still going but any new keyframes you set will like combine with the keyframes before so you can animate like arm flailing or different movements while keeping that base run cycle there still

But it’s a shame that i found out about it now because now we’re not going to use blender anymore so yeah muzzle flash png yes i don’t i don’t want it i don’t know if i want to talk about this that’s not Pleasant you get a nice close-up of like the hand painted textures on the part yeah It all looks really natural the textures with the deformation of the the mouth and the eyelids and stuff it’s like it’s actually skin everyone’s been comparing this part to that one scene in doki doki well because you did that on purpose did i say that

Yes you said you did that on purpose i don’t think i said i did that you said you did that on purpose i guess i did then i don’t know she does the same action with her hand well i didn’t mean that to be like a reference to doki doki

I just kind of had like the same idea twice he did the same thing in skeleton wrap too that’s not a coincidence he doesn’t do this to him but he does the same thing right against the wall and you did that on purpose so that was on purpose you couldn’t have

Done something on purpose and then not do it on purpose the other time and blood splatter dingy as well He’s like we haven’t really had this much blood in the video except for that one old atlantic craft animation where the mom gets their hands pushed in the tree like it’s way worse than this and if anyone was like grossed out by this one they’d have not seen that one

Oh yeah one thing i want to mention is um a lot of the scenes that we rendered in this video with uh zombie girl kathy’s dress was there was actually a lot of points where her skin was clipping through the dress and i had to go into photoshop and meticulously fix like

Every frame that had a dress clipping in it and i had to draw over it like i must have fixed like 100 frames it took so long and my computer just happened to like stop liking me and photoshop every time i open it on my computer just wanted to crash

And every action i would take would freeze the program for like a minute and then i’d have to go into zachary’s computer and do photoshop there and that was probably one of the most frustrating things for me just sitting there every frame that that one shot which is

Putting her arms up and she’s shaking her hips i think like half of that shot is all drawn in dress it’s like it was so bad i think there was 50 frames i had to redraw on that shot alone it was so bad i don’t think anyone noticed though

If he did notice let us know well i forgot so that means i did a pretty good job It’s going to be weird this ends and we have nothing to say and now a message from our sponsor yeah one thing is this this whole end sponsor part animation was all rendered in eevee for time’s sake but i don’t think it actually looks that bad

It looks gravy at least yeah compared to like two or three minutes of frame on the rest of the video this was like 17 seconds of frame i think and it this whole beginning part that’s like 700 frames long had to be re-rendered because if you could see those

Spotlights going like that across the floor i used to have it a volumetric we’re actually still doing this but you could see the volumetric cone shining onto the ground but then later when the shot pans up you could just see blank sources coming from nowhere and then i was like

Ah because i spent so long rendering that because i mean it is evie but still rendering that shot took like four hours because there’s 700 frames so what i had to end up doing is just when the shot pans up the lights just go away whatever helicopter is coming from is gone

Yeah apparently so you this is another place where we just put the tank because we thought it looked boom i just wanted to ask if you hadn’t used the barrel of the tank when it shoots is very conveniently strategically placed right behind the zombie’s back so we didn’t have to do any simulations

For it being shot yeah we just made a light shine behind his head so that we don’t need to actually make a muzzle flash or anything yeah no no no god please don’t eat me if you’re looking i don’t know where i got the idea i feel like there’s like something up here

Like i’m probably thinking of something subconsciously that did that when i made that decision to do that but i can’t exactly think of what it was so i mean if you guys think of anything that’s like similar to this let me know and i’ll

I’ll know it when i see it if it’s based on anything but i feel like it was so you might have noticed that the news reporter guy was voiced by zachary but also the um the zombified version of the zombie result not not the smart zombie but the

The zombie zombie was actually also voiced by zachary he recorded it right here in the studio actually yep it’s right over there on the other side of the studio yeah but i think i’m going to try and do the zombie voice Something like that but i have like voice modifications that i made in premiere nfl studio to my voice and it made it sound like i couldn’t even recognize it was me in the video when i when i did that voice and put all the stuff on it it was like

I like creep myself out with that voice it was a little hard to understand what he was saying though so we had to add subtitles i didn’t think it was hard to understand but micah insisted on subtitles mostly because seth thought it was saying something completely different and way

Worse yeah but that was without lip sync because when i added lip sync and i thought it was much easier to understand what i was saying with the lip sync well maybe i just don’t want anyone to think what’s up but thanks so much for watching so i i think

This is our first time doing this too having like a little animation happening like oh actually we did one so long ago with like the swag pig series we had a swag pig just dancing in the credits and it was like an animation but we haven’t done anything like this

Where there’s like talking and stuff but the whole reason we did this because like we wanted to keep people watching through the entire video and if it was like just showing a bunch of credits people like you know kind of fizzle out and get disinterested but i thought this was

Like this is a cool way to get people like you know stay and watch because i mean i i thought it was really cool to see her like actually talking instead of singing and you know for uh like actually pointing at the annotations and stuff i had to like put the annotations as

Little models in blender for her to point at so i actually knew where she’d be pointing in the end credits scene that was this is all animated by cloudx this last uh scene and it was like it was a lot of frames as well but he was able to do it so

Good job yeah that was the that was the behind the scenes that of zombie girl with me and micah make sure to check out our zombie girl animation if you haven’t seen it already i mean i’m assuming you’ve seen it if you’re watching this video i don’t know

Why i’m watching this one first yeah if you haven’t if you haven’t watched it i don’t know why you started with this video but go and watch it now if you haven’t and make sure to check out kathy and puka garukis for making the original animation and the original song

So yeah thank you all for watching and uh we’ll see you next time bye bye